New 49ers Stadium May Already Yield Benefits

It looks as if Joe Montana and former owner Edward DeBartolo are looking to build a new luxury hotel, sports bar, and entertainment complex near the future 49ers stadium in Santa Clara. Just one of many additional potential benefits a pro sports team can have on an area.

San Jose Christmas Parade Photos

Thanks for the photos Tom!

Merry Christmas San Jose!

Christmas Lights in San Jose

If you want to know which homes in San Jose have the best Christmas decorations, look no further than Lights of the Valley! In addition to descriptions and photos, they even tell you if there are synchronized light shows, FM broadcasts, or websites dedicated to the decorations (some people went all out). You can even select a group of homes to visit and the website will provide driving directions between each location. Click here to see the full list of ultra-merrily decorated homes in San Jose!

Downtown Parking Map

Since a lot of people are coming downtown for holiday events such as Christmas in the Park, I thought this parking map might be handy. My favorite parking spot is the Central Garage below The 88 and The Market by Safeway. I have never seen it completely full and it is very easy to validate the parking just by buying a soda or snack in The Market, or going to just about any restaurant Downtown. The location is also right in central downtown, making everything a quick walk away (this is the reason why The 88 has a perfect walkscore of 100).

Downtown San Jose Restaurant Spreadsheet - Quick Update

I finally got all of the easily accessible data into the restaurant spreadsheet. All restaurant website links should be in there along with restaurant hours (if available on yelp or the restaurant website). Even I was shocked to see the some of the findings after finishing the spreadsheet. I have always complained about how many downtown restaurants close on Sundays--which is a great day to eat Downtown thanks to free and easy to find parking. If you look at the "Open Sunday" column, there is an awful lot of green, meaning there are TONS of restaurant open. In fact, at least 100 downtown restaurants are open on Sunday.

Second major revelation... there are an insane number of restaurants open late. Almost 40 of them are open until midnight or later. 18 restaurants are open until 2am or later on weekends! 5 are open until 3am!! Again, this list would have really came in handy in college. If you haven't bookmarked it by now, here's the link to the spreadsheet.

Wednesday Wishlist: More San Jose Museums!

We have some great museums in San Jose, but I think it's time to bring something new into the mix. Museums aren't just a source of education, they're magnets for tourism--especially if you have a large concentration of them close by. Even in today's economy, if we can bring something new, interesting, and cost effective to the table it should have every chance at success. Here are some ideas I've been tossing around in my head for fun: 

• Video Game Museum - Chronicling the past 40 years of video game history: consoles, mobile devices, arcades, and computer games. The best part about a museum like this would be interactivity. You could sit down and play games from each era. I'm sure something like this would be a hit in San Jose.
• Virtual Reality Fine Art Museum - Imagine a museum that could change every day, or perhaps even every hour. With high definition monitors and projectors, it would not be very difficult to digitally recreate parts of any museum in the world. Imagine walking into a wing of the Louvre one day and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art the next.
• Entrepreneurship Museum - There are so many interesting Silicon Valley entrepreneurship stories worth documenting in a museum: Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Will Hewlett and Dave Packard (HP), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Meg Whitman (eBay), and many, many more. 
• Vietnamese History Museum - There are over 100,000 people of Vietnamese ethnicity in San Jose, there's no better place for it in the US.

What type of new museums would you like to have in San Jose?

Silicon Valley Maps

For the past 22 years, the history of Silicon Valley has been chronicled by a small map company simply called Silicon Valley Maps. Each year a new map is published highlighting the key players in the largest and most innovative technology center in the world. Looking through each one in sequence paints an interesting picture on which companies managed to survive over time and which weren't so lucky. However, as an added bonus for me, Downtown San Jose's prominence in Silicon Valley has also been chronicled in these maps. Look for the red squares below... do you notice the trend in how Downtown is conveyed over time?

To see all of the maps, click here!